Congratulations Class of 2020! You blossom amidst disruption!

Graduating in the year of a persistent pandemic which laid bare many systemic injustices, a globally acclaimed social injustice (I’m referring to George Floyd), and a seemingly unreasonable virtual Senior Capstone! Yes, amidst disruption, Ashesi kept you focused on completing your degree as scheduled and with rigour. What was the point of let’s say math, which by the way every Ashesi student has to take, when after all you were stepping into a future of disarray, uncertainty, and volatility OR were you being equipped to brace that future with a hope, purpose, and responsibility.

The excerpts I am about to read come from a doctoral thesis (capstone) on mathematics as one tool to understand social injustice.

In theorising about critical math, a Danish mathematician wondered if a notion of ‘math’ did indeed have formatting power (i.e., math is not neutral). He used an example from a project conducted with elementary school students in Denmark to determine if math could be used as a form of empowerment. The project was the Family Support in a Society Program, which tackled child benefit support for various types of families in Denmark.

In this project, students were tasked with creating an algorithm to determine what factors would impact how their districts should award child benefit support to families. He asserted that, indeed, math could be leveraged as a way “to interpret and to understand features of our social reality” (p. 208). He (2011) further indicated that math should “ensure social response-ability for marginalised groups and should enable students to respond to any situation they find themselves, though the form of response was not specified.

That is, he did not bring to bear other types of knowledges that are also important when understanding social issues. Indigenous knowledges such as the philosophies of African symbols and thought.

Let’s take Sankofa, the adinkra symbol of a bird looking back which comes from the Twi people of Ghana, West Africa and roughly means “going back to retrieve what was lost”. When Sankofa is considered in critical math with African epistemologies, it requires that we embody Sankofa by “rethinking thinking” – a process that requires “learning to unlearn in order to re-learn” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 33), “deconstruction and reconstruction” (Smith, 1999) or “rediscovery and recovery” (Laenui, 2000) “imagining other possibilities”, and lastly, taking some form of action that is appropriate.

Then there is Ubuntu of East and southern Africa which is “borne out of the philosophy that community strength comes off community support, and that dignity and identity are achieved through , empathy, generosity and community commitment” (Swanson, 2007, p. 55). Furthermore, Ubuntu is a humanist perspective rooted in African thought that allows us to shift from I to we. Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained further in his autobiography this powerful concept of Ubuntu.

He says Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, “Yu, u nobuntu”; Hey, so-and-so has Ubuntu. And it means then that you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” We belong in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other persons.” It is not, “I think therefore I am.”

It says rather: “I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.” A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are. (Tutu, 1999, p. 31)

I will end as I began.  Class of 2020, perhaps, mathematics might be just one tool people can use to understand social injustices, but it can be quite incomplete in itself (Bullock, 2018), if it does not build on the notion of other knowledges, responsibility and action.

Congratulations! Class of 2021! May you continue to blossom!